RFC: Accepting SPDX-License-Identifier? (Bug 28007)

[Carlos O'Donell]

Community,

Bug 28007 [1] is about adding SPDX-License-Idenfier [2] to glibc sources.

My position is that I would accept and review patches to add
SPDX-License-Identifier on a per-file basis for the glibc project in addition
to the existing notifications.

The SPDX identifiers increase our maintenance cost because they need to be
kept in sync with the existing license information. I believe the cost is small
enough for the benefit of having identifiers match the kernel's own uses of
the identifiers.

The upstream Linux kernel has 60,000+ such per-file identifiers in use today
to facilitate downstream license checking.

glibc headers and kernel headers are used together to constitute the
implementation of required headers. My suggestion is that we follow the same
process that the kernel has used and accept and review patches to implement
per-file identifiers.

Is there any reason we would not accept such identifiers?

Florian, You raised some good points on the bug, would you like to expand on
those here in the thread?

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.

[1] https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=28007
[2] https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/using-SPDX-short-identifiers-in-source-files/#e2-format-for-spdx-license-identifier